News and opinion about wildland fire
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized4 Comments on Border collies help reseed after forest fire Above: Dog trainer Francisca Torres and her three border collies. Screenshot from the video below.
Three border collies are helping to reseed areas in Chile that burned during the siege of wildfires that blackened large sections of the country in January of 2017.
The high-energy dogs are outfitted with pouches containing native seed. As they run through the burned trees the seeds are distributed along their path.
Above: Satellite photo taken May 6, 2018, showing the OK Bar Fire in Arizona.
Firefighters are just about finished with the OK Bar Fire in the southern panhandle of New Mexico three miles from the Mexican border. They made their “final” update on InciWeb May 4, writing:
The perimeter of the fire is secure, and firefighters are patrolling the perimeter and monitoring the fire by air. Due to aggressive fire management planning by the landowner and supporting non-profit organization, fire suppression actions have been designed to maximize firefighter safety and keep costs commensurate with the values at risk. Smoke and flames will continue to be visible on the mountain until significant moisture has been received on the fire.
The management strategy was not full suppression. Sunday’s National Situation Report shows 61,436 acres burned, an increase of 188 over the day before, and 5 engines assigned, for a total of 20 personnel.
Above: Data from the Incident Management Team, May 5, 2018.
Three large wildfires in Big Cypress National Park and Preserve in South Florida have burned a total of 38,808 acres. Along with several other small fires they are being managed as the Avian Complex.
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized1 Comment on Fire kites become weapons on Gaza border The kites carry burning material that can start vegetation fires
Palestinians protesting along the Gaza border are attaching burning material to kites to fly over the fence into Israel in a new tactic as demonstrations enter their fourth week. The kites have started vegetation fires in wheat fields, forests, and towns.
In an attempt to mitigate the threat, the Israel Defense Forces have developed a new gunsight that should make it easier for soldiers to shoot down kites sent across the border.
Most of the structures were unoccupied bungalows primarily used in the summer
Above: Fire in South Fallsburg, NY. Screenshot from the video below.
A vegetation fire in South Fallsburg, New York grew to a five alarm incident that destroyed 27 structures Wednesday. The fire spread into two bungalow colonies burning seasonal buildings that were unoccupied at the time.
The fire was fought by 300 firefighters, mostly volunteers, from 39 departments in four counties. By the time they first arrived it was already moving through both colonies.
South Fallsburg is in the Catskill Mountains about 40 air miles northwest of New York City.
Mirriam-Webster defines a bungalow as “a one-storied house with a low-pitched roof; also : a house having one and a half stories and usually a front porch.” In the Catskills these homes are primarily used in the summer.
The video below reportedly shows the fire shortly after it started and began to approach the bungalows.
Below is another video shot at the scene of the fire.
Above, image credit:NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team
I found out today that NASA has been measuring wildfire smoke plumes for at least a decade. The nine cameras on the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) have been capturing imagery of the Tinder Fire as it passes overhead on NASA’s Terra satellite. With a little trigonometry it can determine the height of smoke columns. The image above shows what it came up with after analyzing the fire on April 30, the day after it made its biggest run. Strong winds on both days probably kept the smoke from rising as high as it would have under calmer conditions.
(To see all articles on Wildfire Today about the Tinder Fire, click here.)
The two photos below were taken the day before the NASA analysis described here.
Below is how NASA described the April 30 analysis:
“On April 30 at 11:15 a.m. local time, the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) captured imagery of the Tinder Fire as it passed overhead on NASA’s Terra satellite. The MISR instrument has nine cameras that view Earth at different angles. This image shows the view from MISR’s nadir (downward-pointing) camera. The angular information from MISR’s images is used to calculate the height of the smoke plume, results of which are superimposed on the right-hand image (Figure 1). This shows that the plume top near the active fire was at approximately 13,000 feet altitude (4,000 meters). In general, higher-altitude plumes transport smoke greater distances from the source, impacting communities downwind. A stereo anaglyph (Figure 2) providing a three-dimensional view of the plume is also shown. Red-blue glasses with the red lens placed over your left eye are required to observe the 3D effect.
“These data were acquired during Terra orbit 97691. The smoke plume height calculation was performed using the MISR INteractive eXplorer (MINX) software tool, which is publicly available at https://github.com/nasa/MINX. The MISR Plume Height Project maintains a database of global smoke plume heights, accessible at https://www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov/getData/accessData/MisrMinxPlumes2/.
“MISR was built and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Terra spacecraft is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The MISR data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center in Hampton, Virginia. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena.”
